Raspberry Pi

You would have to have been living under a rock for the last few years to not to have at least heard of the Raspberry Pi, a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools.

Powered by a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip which uses an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor (capable of being overclocked up-to 1 GHz) and with 256MB (earlier models) or 512MB of RAM and built in USB, ethernet and a series of general purpose inputs and outputs the Raspberry Pi has been very popular with electronics and computer geeks like me and there are loads of interesting projects appearing.

Raspberry Pi Sinclair TV LCD Conversion I got the idea for this after watching Dave’s teardown of the 1984 Sinclair flat screen pocket TV and thought it looked like a good candidate to make a cool retro style status display housing.
So soon after watching Dave’s teardown I headed off to eBay and picked one up, this one was non-functional to begin with (dead CRT) so I had ... Read More

Using Raspberry Pi as a base station for TinyTX The guys at OpenEnergyMonitor were kind enough to send me a prototype of their new RFM12Pi board a few weeks ago, this handy little kit allows our favourite low power radio board to be connected to the immensely popular Raspberry Pi. This makes setting up a tiny little server for receiving data from the OEM ... Read More

Using a Parrot DF3120 Picture Frame as a Status Display The Parrot DF3120 is a rather old 3.5″ LCD picture frame with a 320×240 64K colour display, nothing to shout about but there are a few things that make it a bit more interesting. For starters it has built in bluetooth, USB, an SD card reader, a tilt sensor, a light sensor and three buttons on the ... Read More

Raspberry Pi and I2C devices of different voltage After my recent posts on using the MCP23017 I/O expander with the Raspberry Pi several people have queried the connection of an I2C device running at 5v to the Raspberry Pi’s 3v3 I/O. The reason why this is safe in this case is that on an I2C bus the clock and data lines are open-drain ... Read More

Raspberry Pi I/O Expander Board To simplify using the the MCP23017 I/O Expander on the Raspberry Pi I’ve made a little plug in board using a Slice of Pi from Ciseco. The Slice of Pi is a handy little PCB that plugs directly onto the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins and gives a convenient row of labelled standard 0.1 inch (2.54mm) headers for ... Read More

Edimax EW-7811Un Wi-Fi Adapter on the Raspberry Pi This dinky little USB Wi-Fi adapter seems like a good match for the Raspberry Pi, it seems silly to have a huge dongle sticking out of something so small and this little thing really is tiny, it’s only £10 including delivery on eBay too and will work on the Pi without a powered hub.
I checked ... Read More

Python tools for the MCP23017 I/O Expander I’ve been playing around with the MCP23017 I2C I/O Expander on my Raspberry Pi a bit more this week and as I mentioned in an update to the last post I’m now running this 3.2 kernel that has hardware I2C drivers for the Pi. The next step was finding a better way to control the ... Read More

Raspberry Pi and the MCP23017 I2C I/O Expander I had a quick play with the I2C drivers that are currently being developed for the Raspberry Pi this afternoon and managed to get a MCP23017 16-bit I/O Expander working with it without any fuss.
Here is a highly exciting video of it blinking an LED:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnA_uNi1Op0
The MCP23017 is a handy 28 pin chip that gives you ... Read More

Raspberry Pi Finally Arrives After a long wait the Raspberry Pi I ordered from Farnell on 29th February finally arrived yesterday.
I expect that most people reading this blog knows all about the Raspberry Pi and the charity behind it by now, designed with the aim to bring programming back into the school curriculum and spawn a new generation of coders, ... Read More